


situation normal

by falterth



Series: Naruto Femslash Week 2018 [16]
Category: Naruto
Genre: Crushes, F/F, Naruto Femslash Week 2018, Nonbinary Orochimaru, Seals Gone Wrong, sakura is gay for big muscles, temporary time travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-02
Updated: 2018-09-02
Packaged: 2019-07-05 19:07:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,305
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15869895
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/falterth/pseuds/falterth
Summary: Sakura begins to think that something might be wrong when someone who looks suspiciously like a fourteen-year-old version of Senju Tsunade destroys the training ground she’d been standing in just moments before. She knows something’s wrong when she looks up and sees only two heads on top of the Hokage monument.(In Sakura’s defense, there aren’t any laws against crushing on one of the Legendary Sannin. Especially not when you’re both pretty much the same age! Sakura indulges a little and allows herself to have exactly one thought about kissing Tsunade. She doesn’t put a limit on thoughts about Tsunade’s muscles, though. Slightly crack-ish. Naruto Femslash Week 2018, free day.)





	situation normal

**Author's Note:**

> LAST DAY OF FEMSLASH WEEK!!

“Why’d they have to send _us_ to check out some stupid seal?” Naruto whines. “Why can’t they send some _other_ team? This is cutting out of my precious Hokage training time, y’know!” This last bit is directed at Kakashi-sensei.

“Your Hokage training? Really?” Sakura says. “The training that you’ve been neglecting?”

“Sakura,” Naruto says quietly, eyes darting toward her. “You’re blowing my cover!”

“What cover?” she asks. Sakura considers this her payback for Naruto disrupting her training with Yamato-sensei. “You mean the cover for you to go eat at Ichiraku Ramen instead?”

“TOTALLY NOT THAT COVER,” Naruto says loudly, looking at Kakashi-sensei nervously. From the look on their teacher’s face, he doesn’t buy it, not one bit. “It’s my ultra important Hokage training! Gosh, Sakura, I told you this already!”

Sakura gives him an unimpressed—not fond, nope, not fond at all—look. “Uh huh. Right. And of course you didn’t invite me to ramen yesterday while telling me that we wouldn’t get caught because you told Kakashi-sensei you were doing private training to become Hokage.”

“Oh, come on,” Naruto pleads. “That was only one time.”

Sakura decides to drop the bomb. “He can hear our conversation, Naruto. He knows everything you just said. You really need to—”

“We’re here!” Kakashi-sensei interrupts, flat-out ignoring Naruto’s devastated expression and Sakura’s somewhat smug one. “Now, you kids can just hang back while I check on the seal. I might call you to help me out with some testing, but for the most part, this is a strange seal, most likely painted by someone who isn’t friendly toward Konoha—can anyone tell me who the last seal-master we produced is?”

Naruto immediately jumps into the air. “I know this one! I know it! Ero-sennin! He’s a big pervert but unfortunately he’s also really really _really_ good at seals, so we can’t just throw him in a dumpster somewhere and hope he gets lost and can’t come out.”

Sometimes Sakura is concerned about what goes on in Naruto’s head. Right now, though, she can only find herself agreeing. “I mean, come on,” she adds. “Didn’t you tell me he just dragged you around to bath houses while he was training you?”

“Yeah!” Naruto exclaims, turning around to look at her with wide eyes. “I mean, can you believe it?”

Sakura’s about to reply, something along the lines of, not from anyone other than Jiraiya, but seeing as it’s him, yes, I totally can, when Kakashi-sensei tells them to stay on track. “For the most part, the seal looks incomplete. Whoever was drawing it might have been scared off by a patrol or something. I just need to channel chakra into it to make sure . . . ” Kakashi stands there for a few sentences making a weird face—at least, it looks weird, at least from what Sakura can see—and then he says, “I can’t do it. I—I can’t do it? What?”

“You can’t channel chakra into it?” Sakura asks. That’s new—Kakashi-sensei can usually do _anything_ he wants to. At least he sounds as confused as she feels.

“It’s sending my own chakra back to me, almost like it was meant for a different chakra,” Kakashi explains. “It feels as though my chakra is too intense for it. Think of it like trying to put your leg in a sleeve meant for your arm. It won’t work unless you have really stretchy sleeves or freakishly small legs. Anyway . . . Looks like you two will have to help me after all! Naruto, come here. Stand like this . . . no, further away from the seal—we don’t know what it’ll do if you’re too close to it.”

“Ero-sennin taught me this!” Naruto volunteers the information easily, jumping up excitedly as he tends to do when talking. Sakura will absolutely _not_ admit that it’s kind of cute and maybe even endearing. Neither will she admit that she’s kind of taken to seeing Naruto as a little brother. It’s not her fault he’s so short! And little! “He said that usually seals only affect things they’re touching, or things very near to them. He said only some special seals that are like _really really gigantic_ can do stuff to things far away! This seal is kind of puny though.”

Kakashi-sensei eyes the seal on the ground and Sakura cranes her neck to get a better view of it too. It’s written in brown ink on a huge slab of stone probably produced by a jutsu. It looks messy and there’s a whole sliver of it that looks unfinished. Sakura would say that it’s about as big in diameter as she is tall. If that’s small, then she doesn’t even want to know what a big seal looks like. Or how much _effort_ would be put into making one. “Very good, Naruto! You’re right,” Kakashi-sensei says, and the praise is offered up just as easily as Naruto’s knowledge about seals. Naruto beams at him and Kakashi-sensei ruffles his hair. Sakura wishes Kakashi-sensei would ruffle _her_ hair. “Now, remember how you flared your chakra when we tested your affinity with the little slips of paper? Just do that, but try to point it at the seal.”

What follows is a spectacular flare of chakra that somehow manages to make Sakura’s _own_ coils hurt.

“I couldn’t steer it at the seal! What happened? I tried but my chakra was just all, ‘Oh I want to go everywhere’ and it felt like I got zapped or something! Kakashi-sensei, what _was_ that?” Naruto asks, firing off the questions almost faster than Sakura can keep up with them.

“Hmm . . . ” Kakashi-sensei scratches his chin for a moment, and then says, “Oh. I forgot you have awful chakra control. This won’t do. Sakura, your turn.” She gets up and walks past an offended and squawking Naruto—she will not admit it’s cute she will not admit it’s cute she _will not—_ and takes her place at Kakashi-sensei’s side, looking up at him questioningly. “Stand here, away from the seal,” he instructs. “And channel your chakra into it, just like you did for the affinity testing.”

Sakura closes her eyes and concentrates. She hasn’t had much practice with directing her chakra other than water- and tree-walking, and even then, she hasn’t done too much of that. Since that awful Sasuke retrieval mission went so completely, horribly wrong about a month ago, Kakashi-sensei has had them on easy D-ranks for a while. Sakura suspects he’s trying to get them to go to therapy, too, if the sticky note in her mailbox saying “I have connections in the Yamanaka mental health clinic contact me if you need therapy” signed with a badly-drawn scarecrow face is any indication of things.

She manages to grasp onto a little thread of her chakra, and she successfully directs it toward the seal. She doesn’t really know what to do next, but instinct takes over and something _clicks,_ like a key in a lock, and she opens her eyes to find that the seal has . . . done absolutely nothing.

Kakashi-sensei seems to notice her distress, because he’s quick to offer reassurance. “It glowed red for a few seconds,” he says, and Sakura finds herself perking up. “But other than that, nothing. As I said before, it’s an incomplete seal. It’s most likely made with people who have fine chakra control in mind. Which, admittedly, is smart—when targeting a group of shinobi, always take out the medics and the fine-details people first. It’s a good thing this seal wasn’t finished, or else worse could have happened.”

“You mean . . . if it had worked—”

“No, not like that. You were standing quite a safe distance away from it. Whoever designed this seal made it much too obvious—it most likely wouldn’t have worked on anyone. Nothing’s going to happen, Sakura. There’s nothing to worry about!” Kakashi-sensei says cheerfully. Sakura relaxes, feeling the beginnings of a happy smile on her face. She helped Kakashi-sensei with something!

This, of course, is when something happens. The world falls away from under Sakura’s feet and everything goes white.

_#_

“MOVE!” someone screams at her. Sakura’s dizzy. She feels motion sick. She’s going to _kill_ Kakashi-sensei once she stops being on the verge of puking. “I said _move_ you stupid dummy Tsunade’s going to punch the ground! Get out if you don’t wanna _die_!”

Sakura’s brain catches up with her ears and she looks up in time to see a tall white-haired kid cupping his hands around his mouth and shouting at her to get the hell out of the training ground. She sees a blonde girl and a black-haired . . . person? off to the boy’s right, and the blond girl has her fist reared back in preparation for a punch. Sakura does the sensible thing and uses all the strength in her puny little thirteen-year-old legs and sprints toward the forest to the right of the grounds, only stopping when she’s sure she’s well out of the area. She hears a sort of muffled _boom_ behind her, and when she makes her way over toward the group of kids she’s surprised to see that the training ground is a mess. Like, cracks-in-the-ground-destroyed-earth mess.

“What were you _doing?_ ” the white-haired boy asks her, drawing her attention away from the decimated dirt and grass that used to be training ground ten. “Appearing like that in the middle of nowhere? What team are you on?”

Sakura looks at the boy a little more closely, now that she’s not in immediate danger of upchucking. He has two red marks that sort of remind her of tear-tracks running down his cheeks. “You look like Jiraiya,” she comments absently. Okay, maybe her brain-to-mouth filter hasn’t started up yet. She’ll have to fix—

“I _am_ Jiraiya,” he says, sounding like she’s just insulted him in the worst way possible. Wait. _Jiraiya?_

“You can’t be Jiraiya,” Sakura reasons, “because Jiraiya’s a perverted old man.”

The blonde girl behind the Jiraiya-impostor bursts into laughter. “Damn right!”

The Jiraiya-impostor scoffs. “I’m _fourteen._ I’m not an old man. Get lost, loser. Can’t even recognize me. I’m gonna be Konoha’s next sealmaster! Show some respect!”

What was that phrase that Kakashi-sensei liked to blabber on about all the time? Something about . . . ah, right. Situation normal: all fucked up. Also known as SNAFU. Sakura thinks that SNAFU applies to pretty much everything that’s going on right now. She’s starting to suspect the blonde girl is Senju Tsunade, the _Godaime Hokage,_ the woman she has to call Tsunade-sama, and the way-too-pale person is Orochimaru, which . . . wow. Disgusting. _Orochimaru._ And they’re probably not even evil yet! Sakura doesn’t know how to feel about that, so she does what most shinobi do: she doesn’t. She, in her infinite wisdom, decides to look away from all of them right now because she thinks her brain might explode if she things about it any more, and something catches her eye.

It’s the Hokage monument. With _two_ heads on it. Only two.

Oh, gods. Sakura’s life is falling apart and it’s all because of that stupid seal Kakashi had made her stand next to. Incompleted her _ass._ She has a family to go back to! She has friends—friends? Maybe. Ino’s kind of on hold right now, seeing as they’ve got that whole love rivalry going on. Honestly, though her crush on Sasuke had died long before they’d even graduated, but it’s not like she’s going to tell that to _Ino_ of all people. Naruto . . . she’s not sure if he’s a friend. She likes him, at least. And her moms! Her moms, the only other people besides Kakashi-sensei and Naruto and Sasuke—scratch that, she hates Sasuke right now—and Ino that had actually _mattered._ If that stupid seal sent her back in time she’s going to be _so mad._

Oh, well. Might as well accept it while it lasts. She can go back to being regular Sakura when she’s home again with her moms and her pink room and fluffy bed. Right now she has to be badass Sakura. She only distantly realizes that Orochimaru—young Orochimaru _ew ew ew_ —is talking.

“ . . . were you doing, appearing in the middle of our _reserved_ training ground?” they ask.

“I’m Haruno Sakura. What year is it?” Sakura asks back. Orochimaru blinks. They probably aren’t used to people not answering their questions. Good. It serves them right for being an asshole in the future. They tell her what year it is, somewhat cautiously, and she groans. Great. She won’t even be born for, like, _ever_. Ugh _._ “Okay, so it’s a really long story—oh, no, it isn’t. Well, my sensei made me channel chakra into this weird unfinished seal that was probably actually finished and it sent me here and I’m probably back in time.”

“Your sensei’s dumb,” Tsunade says helpfully. Sakura gets a good look at her and, to her dismay, finds herself blushing furiously. Nobody told her that young Tsunade was so pretty! It’s not her fault if she thinks about things like Tsunade lifting her up with one finger or something else crazy like that. Or Tsunade punching the ground and destroying it. Or Tsunade wiping out a battlefield of enemies and then turning to her only for Sakura to see that she hasn’t even broken a sweat.

Get it together, Sakura, she tells herself. Tsunade’s the _Hokage._ And also one of the Legendary Sannin. Sakura is not _allowed_ to have a crush on Tsunade, or else it’ll be awkward when she goes back. Then again . . . nobody has to know. She figures she can indulge herself a little bit. After all, she’s being badass Sakura right now. She thinks she deserves a little special treatment, even if she’s the one giving it to herself.

“He is,” Sakura agrees readily, already pointedly not looking at Tsunade’s face because she’s too pretty and Sakura will blush forever if she has to endure this unfairness. “But you have to hide me until I figure out a way to get back, okay? You can’t tell _anyone_ I’m here.”

“Keeping secrets, huh?” Tsunade asks, grinning. She leans over and ruffles Sakura’s hair. It feels nicer than she wants to admit. And it’s not Sakura’s fault if she’s deprived of hair-ruffles. Thanks a lot, Kakashi-sensei. “I like it! You can stay with Orochimaru. They’ll take care of you.” Jiraiya, Sakura, and Orochimaru all glare at Tsunade. Okay. Maybe Sakura is letting herself have a very tiny brief crush on Tsunade and maybe— _maybe—_ she’s thought about kissing Tsunade once _and only once,_ thank you very much, but she won’t deny that suggestion was unbelievably dumb. So she says as much. “Hey!” Tsunade protests. “Who else is going to watch over her?” They all stare pointedly at Tsunade again. “Oh, fine. I see how it is. Training’s technically over anyway, and Sarutobi-sensei isn’t coming back for a few days, so . . . come on! Let’s go to my house!”

Sakura nods, somewhat happily, and the two of them split ways with Orochimaru and Jiraiya after a lot of ribbing and shared jokes. Well, Jiraiya and Tsunade had cracked jokes. Orochimaru had just looked vaguely amused. They seem to look like that most of the time. Now that Sakura thinks about it, it’d be a little _weird_ if they didn’t look amused. Anyway, she’s walking _alone_ with Tsunade now, and Sakura knows that she’s the type to get infatuated quickly but _holy heck_ Tsunade has big muscles and Sakura? Sakura _really likes big muscles._ So she may or may not spend the entire walk home staring at Tsunade’s arms, not thinking about the fact that the Tsunade she knows is practically ancient and is the _actual Hokage among other things._ They get to Tsunade’s place, and Sakura expects a house, but it’s an apartment.

“You’re . . . not living in a house? I thought you were a S—”

“I wanted my own space,” Tsunade says. “And Tobirama-sensei is always too doting. He’s like, call me Tobirama-sensei, Tsunade, even though I’m your uncle! I teach you things! And then he turns around and tries to buy me, like, three kunai sets. If he was my _real_ sensei, that’d be favoritism. No way he would buy Jiraiya or Orochimaru a bunch of top-notch kunai. It’s like he wants to spoil me but he doesn’t think he should. Make up your mind!”

Tsunade’s dreamy, Sakura thinks to herself.

“Do you _want_ to be spoiled?” she asks.

Tsunade gives her a _look._ “What kind of question is that? Of course I want to be spoiled! I just hate that he can’t spoil me properly and needs to hide it behind excuses like, ‘I’m your sensei, so I should be buying you things.’ I mean . . . I guess he teaches me a lot. I just feel bad knowing he wants to spoil me but can’t. And besides, it’s . . . it hasn’t been the same since father passed away. Mother’s still going strong, though, but she’s back in Uzushio right now.”

Right. Tsunade’s dad is the first Hokage. One of the actual founders of Konoha. And he’d been married to Uzumaki Mito, who Sakura had had a solid crush on for about a month when she’d first read about her in her history books. Maybe there’s a ‘make Sakura have a crush on you’ gene somewhere in there. It would explain the whole Tsunade thing, at least. She suddenly has an idea. Sakura’s about to open her mouth to ask about Jiraiya potentially designing a seal to send her back when her stomach lurches sickeningly and she has to bend over and puke.

“Hey! Uncool! You better—hey,” Tsunade says, and then, in a softer tone, “Are . . . are you okay?”

It’s the exact same feeling she got when she arrived here. She swears to all the gods, if she crash-landed here and went through all the trouble of developing a crush on _the actual Godaime Hokage what the heck Sakura_ just to be yanked back to her own time an hour later, she’s going to be pissed.

“I think the seal is trying to suck me back into my own time,” Sakura says woozily, feeling like her ears are full of cotton. She loses her balance. This would be bad, except that Tsunade catches her and she gets to feel Tsunade’s big muscles _right there next to her._ Sakura politely informs her brain that this isn’t really a good time to short out, but of course it doesn’t listen.

“That’s good!” Tsunade says encouragingly. “Why . . . why do you look mad?”

“I think I may have developed a teeny tiny crush on you and had one—only one!—thought of kissing you so I don’t want to leave because you’re really old when I come from,” Sakura confesses.

“What—”

The world falls away from under Sakura’s feet and everything goes white.

_#_

“—told her Haruno Sakura’s been eaten by a seal in training ground ten and she rushed over like someone was hot on her heels,” someone says. It sounds like Kakashi-sensei. Or it might be Naruto. Sakura’s ears haven’t started working properly yet.

Sakura cracks her eyes open and everything is blissfully, _beautifully_ blurry. But all good things have to end, so she blinks a couple times and is greeted by the face of Senju Tsunade—the _old_ Senju Tsunade, the _right_ one from _her_ time that definitely looks nothing like the cute girl she used to be. The one she has to call Tsunade-sama. Sakura groans loudly.

“Guess it wasn’t just a shared fever dream I had with Jiraiya and Orochimaru, eh?” Tsunade-sama says. She’s got that evil I’m-about-to-tease-you-for-a-year-about-this look that Naruto and Kakashi seem to have down to an art. Sakura wonders if Tsunade-sama learned it from them just so she could tease Sakura about this moment.

She groans again.

She is _never_ going to live this down.


End file.
